April 2005

Contents

Upcoming Events

Potomac Watershed Cleanup Events, April 10th and 16th

Two Opportunities to Help Us Create Sligo Friendly Landscaping, April 9th and 16th

The “Big Pull”RIP: Earth Day Launch April 23rd

News

Reminder – Be Sure of Your Weeds

Grant for Eastern Middle School Raingarden

AmericanUniversity’s Sligo Creek Restoration Project

Stormwater Committee Enters Twilight Zone

Update on FrogWatch

Feature on Box Turtles

Box turtles: Uncommon Denizens of Sligo Creek

From the Board of Directors

From the April 5thBoard Meeting

Upcoming Events

Potomac Watershed Cleanup Events, April 10th and 16th

Friends of Sligo Creek is organizing a major cleanup of Sligo this spring as part of a coordinated campaign with other watershed groups. Several Cleanup events are scheduled this month, as part of the 17th Annual Alice Ferguson Foundation Annual Potomac River Watershed Cleanup and the Anacostia Watershed Society’s annual Earth Day, Anacostia Cleanup.

The cleanup planned for April 2 was postponed due to weather. But despite the effort to get the postponement announcement out, several people showed up in the rain and made a substantial dent in the trash load, particularly in sections 6 and 10.

We are hoping for good weather for the two events scheduled for Sunday, April 10 and at least two more on the following Saturday, April 16. Volunteers are always needed to help keep our park looking great. For information on these cleanup events, including times, directions and contacts, please see the Friends website calendar at

Two Opportunities to Help Us Create Sligo Friendly Landscaping, April 9th and 16th

Come help us install Sligo Friendly Landscaping (including a rain garden!) at EasternMiddle School. Bring a shovel if you have one. This is a joint Friends of Sligo Creek and Eastern PTA project. Both days we will be working from 9 am to 1 pm. We need help, digging, planting, hauling and watering. Come and stay as long as you can. Contact Ed Murtagh 301-649-7266 if you have questions. See the article below about the Green Landscaping Partnership for details about how this Landscaping with raingarden came to be.

“The Big Pull” – RIP Earth Day Launch

Please reserve Sunday, April 23, from 10:30 – 2:00 p.m., to join our big RIP- Removing Invasive Plants Project Launch! This Earth Day event will mark the official start of the RIP project. We have an exciting day planned.We will meet at the playground at the intersection of Flower Ave and Sligo Creek Parkway. If it rains, we will hold the event on the 24th, same time, same place. The agenda for the day is:

  • 10:30 Registration, nature and plant walks, family activities, music
  • 11:30 Welcome, speakers, prizes
  • 12:00 "The Big Pull"
  • 1:00 Informal talk with representatives, nature and plant walks, refreshments, family activities, music
  • 2:00 Closing

We are inviting key people from Parks and Planning, and federal, state, and local representatives. A Friend's of Sligo Creek information table will be set up, and a RIP table for registration and sign in. The day’s activities will include: tableswith samples of invasive plants and information, music,and coloring sheets,free frisbees, nature walks, plant identification walks, and, what will be an especially satisfying event, ”The Big Pull.”

The main event of the day, “The Big Pull," will be a gathering of as many people as possible to pull porcelain berry from a large marked strip along a path on the site. We hope to clear most of this sizeable area – its always amazing how much a group of good people can accomplish!

We will need as much help as we can get both on the day of the event and in preparation for it. If you can help with staffing tables and on site activities at the launch, or would like to be involved in advertisement (i.e. distributing handouts or putting up – and later taking down – posters in your neighborhood) please let us know. Tell your friends about it, too. Contact Sally Gagne, 301 588-2071 to volunteer, or for more information.

See you there.

News

Be Sure of Your Weeds

Three species of grape, all native, exist in Sligo.It is sad to seea number of cut grape vines in many sections of the Park. Our suspicion is that some peopleassume thatall vines are bad. If wecutnativevines we would be destroying an important habitat,and asignificant source offood for birdswould disappear.

Pleasetell any acquaintancesworking in the park that they must be Weed Warriors to pull weeds, and that cutting the native grape is not sanctioned by RIP or the Park. In fact, itisillegal. If yousee a grape thatseems tobe affecting a tree, please contact Sally Gagne at .

To avoid errorsinidentification, we willwait for summer beforeremoving bittersweet and porcelain berry (one exception is the RIP launch), as they are more easilyrecognizablethen. InJuly and Augustwe will mark invasive vineswith pink tape, to be cut at any point afterward. If you see someonecuttingporcelain berry, bittersweet, or grape now, they may not have gotten the word yet,andwe would appreciate knowing about it.

Green Landscaping Partnership

Grant for Eastern Middle School Raingarden Approved

An exciting new project has been started on the grounds of EasternMiddle School. Friends of Sligo Creek has entered into a Green Landscaping partnership with Eastern Middle School PTSA in Silver Spring, the Anacostia Watershed Society, and the Neighbors of the Northwest Branch to implement an environmentally beneficial landscaping plan at EasternMiddle School. The landscape plans includes building a showcase raingarden near the school entrance. The Chesapeake Bay Trust recently approved a grant to help implement this project.

Raingardens are an inexpensive and ecologically friendly way to improve water quality in Sligo Creek, the Northwest Branch, and down to the Chesapeake Bay. By using environmentally beneficial landscaping, we reduce storm water runoff, improve wildlife habitat, and reduce the need for fertilizer. The project at EasternMiddle School, in addition to improving the environment, will improve the appearance of the schoolyard and provide an educational opportunity for the students and the community. The County will provide informative signage describing the project, and the parents are being informed through their PTA newsletter.

This demonstration project is a great way to educate the community about the many benefits of sustainable landscaping and Low Impact Development (LID) techniques. We hope to enter into more such partnerships in the future. For more information on this project, stormwater management, or LID in general, contact Ed Murtagh at .

AmericanUniversity’s Sligo Creek Restoration Project

Dr. Susan Solarz has a class restoration projectin Sligo. For a look at pictures and a description of the class,see Susan’s very impressive website at, .

Susan teaches at AmericanUniversity. This project, undertaken byher conservation class, includes input from Friends of Sligo Creek, the Parks Dept of Prince Georges County, and others.

The restoration site is immediately upstream from Riggs Road. At a workday in March, students identified the plant species presentboth there and at a comparison site a quarter mile further upstream; this is part of an ongoing biodiversity study. Students also removed trash, including a lawn mower, a safe and a chair. Then they pulledkudzu trailers back to the crowns to awaitfurther management by the county. At an April 3 workday students removed invasive plants and planted natives.

Stormwater Committee enters Twilight Zone

Ten or 12 people, including two folks who came all the way from Alexandria, gathered at the Historic Takoma Theatre in Takoma, DC on March 19th to see a much advertised film: Reining in the Storm—One Building at a Time. Unfortunately, there was no film. In fact, the theatre was open only because the owner was there making adjustments to the Marquee. We never found with certainty where the original faulty announcement had come from, but the Virginians thought they had seen it in a major newspaper calendar. At any rate, we all went to dinner together and had a good conversation about Stormwater and other things and we bought a copy of the film to show at some future time. Stay tuned.

Update on FrogWatch

More than forty adults and children attended orientations on March 7 and 12 for the 2005 FrogWatch in Sligo Creek. Our FrogWatch is part of FrogWatch USA, a long-term monitoring program managed by the National Wildlife Federation and the US Geological Survey.

At each orientation, ecologist and Friends of Sligo Creek member Karen Nelson introduced the natural history of frogs and surveyed the thirteen species of frogs considered possible in SligoPark. Everyone had a chance to hear the calls of these species, and then test their ability to distinguish the calls in a quiz. It was great fun!

Karen and Natural History chair Michael Wilpers provided packets of materials including charts on the songs and natural history of Sligo frogs, maps of monitoring sites with driving directions, and a newspaper article on our 2004 FrogWatch. More than $300 of books on frogs and frog songs were sold, generously provided on consignment by Audubon Naturalist Society. By the end of orientation, thirty individuals and families had signed up to serve as FrogWatch monitors for 17 sites along Sligo, Wheaton Branch, and Long Branch.

As of April 5, we have received 21 reports from 12 of the seventeen sites. Much to the disappointment of our monitors, we have only two reports of frog songs: a single singing Spring Peeper near the Wheaton Branch stormwater ponds on March 20 (by Dorothy Jachim) and another singing Peeper at the Forest Glen stormwater pond on March 30 (by Ian and Ross Campbell). Chris Kosnik saw a large frog at the Forest Glen pond, but it didn’t sing. (FrogWatch records only songs, probably because they are more reliable in identifying species and they reflect mating behavior.)

A major leap forward for FrogWatch has been the new, improved presence on the Friends web site. Web master Clair Garman incorporated materials provided by Michael and Karen into a very educational and useful resource. Check it out. It’s a show-stopper!

We hope by the next issue of the this Newsletter to report many more “sightings” of frog songs in Sligo Creek.

Feature on Turtles

Box turtles: Uncommon Denizens of Sligo Creek

Box Turtles have probably been living in the forests and floodplains of the Sligo Creek watershed for thousands of years. These slow-moving, long-lived reptiles prefer a mix of habitats that includes plenty of deciduous trees and shrubs, tangles of briers, low tasty herbaceous plants and ample wetlands or streams. Today, box turtles are becoming rare in Maryland but you may still see one in Sligo. If so, you may be watching an animal that has been around for 80 years!

Box turtles can withstand prolonged exposure to below-freezing temperatures. They prefer to overwinter beneath a thick layer of leaf litter, four to five inches below the soil surface, where their metabolic rate is almost entirely shut down. Once they become active again their search for food takes them on small journeys across their 2 to 10 acre home range. They eat insects, earthworms, slugs, berries, fruit and carrion.

Turtles may sit in one place, unmoving, for days at a stretch, then take off on travels of more than 100 yards in a few hours. Females travel greater distances in June, in search of suitable nesting locations, while males may be sedentary unless searching for females. As a result of their need to find open sunny locales for nesting, females are more likely to cross roads.

Be careful when you drive, especially in June. If you see a turtle on the road, and it is safe to do so, stop. Pick the turtle up and move it well off to the side of the road in the same direction that it was going. Even if the area where you find the turtle appears unsafe, this is the turtle's home. It lives and survives here and has been doing so for many years.

Do not carry a turtle to another park, or worse, keep it as a pet. Turtles are becoming endangered, and do not need the added burden of pet keeping. A female pulled out of its natural habitat may be prevented from nesting and contributing her genes to future populations. Encourage your neighbors, friends and schools to refrain from keeping box turtles as pets. For more information on this subject, see

If you see a turtle in SligoCreekPark, please send your sighting in to the Friends of Sligo Creek web page at Here is what to record: exact location (nearest cross street), length of upper shell, male or female (males have longer, thicker tails; a concave depression in the center of the lower shell; and, often, red eyes. You can alsocount the prominent rings in the scute (large plate) of the upper shell. The scute displays one ring for each year of growth (approximately) up to about 20 years of age.

(This article contributed by Chris Swarth, )

From the Board of Directors

The board meets on the first Tuesday of each month and we summarize major items of discussion here. If you have questions or comments, please let one of us hear from you. Check our website for names and contact information at

This month, David Novello and Bernie Bell gave us an update on the progress of the WSSC suit. David Novello is a lawyer and a member of Sligo Friends, who is working with us on the case. Mr. Bell is the pro bono lawyer working with our coalition.

In addition, we discussed:

  • Goals and plans for the Natural History Committee
  • Program for May
  • A package of introductory and policy materials to have on hand for new leaders
  • Grant application for interpretive sign.
  • RIP launch (see article)

News items collected and edited by Ann Hoffnar and Michael Pollock